The initial performance of AMD's new Radeon RX Vega 56 may have looked a little lackluster at launch if you were expecting it to exceed the strides made by Nvidia's year-old GTX 10 series. At best, Vega 56 was a smidgen faster than the GTX 1070 for about the same amount of money, while consuming more power, so despite looking impressive in absolute terms, we felt it was going to be a tough sell.
We had the opportunity to give Vega 56 a good workout at launch, but we didn't receive a Vega 64 card on time for a review. In fact, our sample only arrived Monday, at which point we dropped everything and have been testing since.
With that said, this might be the biggest GPU benchmarking session in TechSpot's history, it's so large that we almost gave up after accepting the challenge. After about a week's worth of testing, we have an incredible amount of data to pour over. Our original plan was to add five games to the 25 titles we originally tested. In the end, after so many requests we felt compelled to add seven more games for a total of 32 titles benchmarked in this article.
Additionally, we've added results from the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics cards, which were compared alongside the custom board partner cards at resolutions of 1080p, 1440p and 4K.
We'll be using our Core i7-7700K test rig clocked at 4.9GHz but still plan to do extensive testing with Vega and the GeForce 10 series on Ryzen as well. Enough messing about, we have work to do...
RX Vega GPU Test Specs
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Benchmarks
Getting things going, we have Ashes of the Singularity aka 'Ashes of the Benchmark' and this is a title I expected AMD's new Vega series to perform quite well in. Nvidia has put a heap of time into developing their drivers to make up for the GeForce 10 series' weak DX12 performance and we see it paying off here. The GTX 1070 roughly matches Vega 56 while the GTX 1080 matched best version of Vega 64 – a mild result overall for AMD.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate has been brought back for this article after receiving quite a few requests for it, including from Tim – not sure if he's a fan of the game or what. Unfortunately, this is a poor title for AMD and even the air-cooled Vega 64 card falls behind the GTX 1070. Not a great effort in our second title tested but AMD has another 30 to titles to recover.
Well that didn't take long, right into Battlefield 1 and already we're seeing much more competitive performance from Vega. Something worth noting though is how poorly the air-cooled Vega 64 card does in this title, only just managing to edge out Vega 56. The liquid cooled version is much more impressive with an average of 122fps, which is a good bit faster than even a custom GTX 1080.